Bobby Fischer and the Difficulty of Making Movies About Geniuses

Genius is a form of tunnel vision and leaves little room for contact with common sense.

Photograph by Takashi Seida via Everett

The prestige season of movies is the season of bio-pics. The three spotlight screenings at the New York Film Festival are bio-pics (“The Walk,” “Steve Jobs,” and “Miles Ahead”) and bio-pics about Hank Williams, Chet Baker, and the Kray brothers are coming up soon, too. I confess that I like the genre. If they’re any good at all, bio-pics add a ring of documentary truth to their dramatic gratifications, and there’s a special category of bio-pic that rises to surprising wonder by the very fact of its connection to historical events—by the vast historical impact that the movie traces to the intimate gestures of an individual or a small group.

These dramas, which prove that history is stranger than fiction, rest on a theoretical paradox, and it’s one that’s borne out by a movie that’s opening today, “Pawn Sacrifice,” a mixed bio-pic and docudrama about Bobby Fischer (who’s played by Tobey Maguire). The film depicts Fischer's rise to preëminence in the world of chess and his victory over the Soviet grandmaster and reigning world champion Boris Spassky (Liev Schreiber) in a match in Reykjavik, in 1972. It’s a peculiarly evocative time capsule of the surprisingly intense and widespread chess fever that gripped the country when Fischer competed to become the first (and, it turned out, only) American champion of the twentieth century.

That contest is the movie’s framing device and its center of attention. The film opens with Fischer’s forfeiture of the match’s second game—his refusal to show up at the stage where the match is being played, due to his panoply of discontents, including the noise of the audience, vibrations beneath the stage, and his suspicion of K.G.B. surveillance. This suspicion provides the movie’s first view of Fischer, alone in his room in a rented house, having torn it apart in search of a listening device—a cinematic echo (and a historical foreshadowing) of the ending of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 film “The Conversation.”

That scene is unfortunately the artistic apogee of “Pawn Sacrifice.” Aesthetically, it’s downhill from there. “Pawn Sacrifice” isn’t a very good movie, but it’s nonetheless terrifically engaging. Strangely, the film’s modest dramatic virtues work actively against the pleasure principle and diminish the film’s strongest elements. From the paranoid scene in Reykjavik, the movie reverts to Fischer’s childhood, in Brooklyn, in 1951 (he was born in 1943), where he was raised by his mother, Regina (played by Robin Weigert), in a household frequented by Communists, many of whom were of Russian descent and spoke Russian in his presence. His mother’s leftist sympathies attracted the unwanted attention of McCarthyite authorities, and earned Fischer a lesson in secrecy and suspicion.

Here, the director, Edward Zwick, and the screenwriter, Steven Knight (who co-wrote the story with Stephen J. Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson), provide a semblance of what might be called balance—a connection between Fischer’s paranoia in the prime of adulthood and his primordial experience of espionage due not to the Soviet Union or the K.G.B., but to the United States and the F.B.I. In the course of the action, Fischer gets sufficient reason to distrust the Soviet Union, as well—including his well-founded suspicion that its players were colluding in a 1962 championship-qualifying match to prevent Fischer from achieving the top score.

By that time, Fischer’s passion for chess—and his combative, fiercely competitive temperament—was fuelled by resentment of Soviet domination of the game and, especially, by the advantages enjoyed by Soviet players as state employees who could devote themselves to the game full-time. The core of the movie is Fischer’s effort to deal with the tough practicalities of the chess life in a country that didn’t fund them—and in the face of a monopolistic bureaucracy, the U.S. Chess Federation, that didn’t take him and his championship quest as seriously as he took himself. The key characters are the two men who were Fischer’s crucial supporters during his rise, the lawyer Paul Marshall (Michael Stuhlbarg) and the priest—and chess master—William Lombardy (Peter Sarsgaard), his official chess coach and unofficial life coach.

The movie depicts Fischer’s peculiarities—his anti-Semitism (even though he himself was Jewish), his devotion to the Worldwide Church of God and its radio evangelism, his mood swings and bitter rages, and his increasingly paranoid obsession with conspiracies against him—and suggests that they veered toward mental illness. Fischer’s sister, Joan (Lily Rabe), arranged to meet with Marshall and express to him her fears for Fischer’s health. Soon thereafter, Marshall, who also fears that Fischer is going out of control, confides his own fears to Lombardy. The priest was a longtime friend of Fischer’s (in real life, he was close with Fischer since Fischer was a boy, though the movie depicts him coming into his life somewhat later).

Yet, for all of Lombardy’s selfless dedication to Fischer’s personal well-being—and his compassionate efforts to influence Fischer in the direction of maturity, empathy, and self-awareness—the priest rejects Marshall’s plan to get Fischer psychiatric help. Lombardy tells Marshall that Fischer is an artist—he likens Fischer’s games to Leonardo’s art, and worries that any psychiatric treatment would be to the detriment of Fischer’s game and suggests that, with results so beautiful, it would be criminal to meddle with the mind that creates them.

Fischer may be a pawn in Lombardy’s aesthetic scheme, but he’s also a pawn in Paul’s geopolitical one—and in the geopolitical ambitions of the United States at large. Unlike the Soviet players, who enjoy government support, Fischer must fend for himself, and money is always an object. Paul, who promotes himself to Fischer with claims of official connections, manages to get covert financing from the federal government, allowing Fischer to travel, train, and compete in comfort. (He also gets Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon to pay attention to the match and to offer words of encouragement and patriotic sentiment at a moment when Fischer is threatening to quit.) Fischer is a pawn sacrificed on the chess board of history, his mental health and emotional balance being counted as secondary to his propaganda value in defeating a Soviet player.

Schreiber catches Spassky’s worldlier irony (the weaker player, the more normal man) along with his instilled ideological, quasi-military confidence. As Lombardy, Sarsgaard calmy captures thought in action and keeps two ideas going cinematically at the same time: an absorption in chess and a devotion to the human side of life. But as directed by Zwick, Maguire’s impersonation of Fischer, though committed and lively, is a little tame, capturing the bluster and the gawkiness but lacking both the eerie detachment and the gleeful naïveté that the real-life champion displayed For instance, Zwick dramatizes Fischer’s appearance on “The Dick Cavett Show” soon after winning the championship, intercutting Maguire with the interviewer, but a comparison of the dramatized version with the actual broadcast suggests what’s missing—the blend of Fischer's preternatural relaxation with the touch of evil. Maguire clenches Fischer too much, and doesn’t let him glide with a frighteningly calm surfeit of confidence. The sense of struggle, instead of arising from the drama, arises from the performance.

That’s where the classical paradox of the bio-pic comes into play. The very notion of the bio-pic is at odds with dramatic form. Aristotle noted as much in the “Poetics”:

Unity of plot does not, as some persons think, consist in the unity of the hero. For infinitely various are the incidents in one man's life which cannot be reduced to unity; and so, too, there are many actions of one man out of which we cannot make one action. Hence the error, as it appears, of all poets who have composed a Heracleid, a Theseid, or other poems of the kind. They imagine that as Heracles was one man, the story of Heracles must also be a unity.

Drama seeks explanations, pursues causes that yield effects, whereas biography follows a person into strange byways of experience and into loose and dead ends, tangles and knots of personality. The loose ends that make a life interesting and a person mysterious—the incongruous traits, the skew ones, the wayward impulses, tastes, desires, that mark the complexity of an individual—get in the way of a well-ordered plot. It doesn’t take much digging to find the sort of piquant detail that makes Fischer such a curious character, one far livelier and self-contradictory than the grayed-out version shown by Zwick.

For instance, in a report in Life written soon after the Reykjavik match, Fischer was described was wearing a “natty, dollar-green slubbed-silk suit” and was depicted in a wide range of leisure activities, including being fitted for a suit by his English tailor, playing ping-pong, nuzzling a horse, dining at the home of his bodyguard, and going boating while wrapped to his neck in a blanket. Even if some of these activities were staged for the magazine’s photographers, the very fact of Fischer's coöperation makes for a picturesque round of activities. (The reporter, Brad Darrach, claimed to have “been seeing Fischer frequently, at times daily, for almost a year and a half,” which seems like a story in itself.

Fischer’s many travels from tournament to tournament, including internationally, while still a teen-ager yielded a character who had a surprisingly hefty dose of social conflict, and it comes through in the ease with which he seemed to wear a public persona. His sense of celebrity and its power contrast painfully with his torments; the movie, however, gives little sense of that ease and solely shows a Fischer under the influence.

Such a disunity of character is what’s missing from the movie; to unify the drama, Zwick unifies Fischer and thereby reduces him, and the movie. The director wraps Fischer up very neatly without having an idea that’s big enough, strong enough, dominant enough, obsessive enough to raise that artificial unity to his own personal vision. When Zwick shears off details about Fischer, it’s to reduce his situation to that of the title, a pawn sacrificed by cold warriors and chessthetes alike.

It isn’t only character that comes packed with its conflicting disunities—it is also history, the stuff of life, the unbelievable truth of the ordinary that lend movies about real-life events such strange and wondrous overtones. One oddly fudged historical detail involves the wondrous exotica resulting from Fischer’s widely heralded pursuit of the championship—the broadcast of the match from Reykjavik, which became an unexpected hit for PBS. In “Pawn Sacrifice,” patrons belly up to a bar follow the match as if it were a ballgame—but what they’re seen watching on the television overhead is a live feed of Fischer and Spassky hunched over the chess board. In fact, the broadcast was something altogether more strange: it came from a studio in Albany and was hosted by a curly-haired chess master named Shelby Lyman, an inexperienced television personality whose endearingly awkward spontaneity helped to make the broadcast a success. (The low-tech production had no direct feed from the match; when a move was made, a bell rang in the studio and Lyman would announce, with a cool gravity, “We have a move.”)

“Pawn Sacrifice” also has little to say about the very subject of the film: chess. It’s a troubling game. Edgar Allan Poe said as much in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” from 1841, writing about the “elaborate frivolity of chess,” where “what is only complex is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound.”

The best chess-player in Christendom may be little more than the best player of chess; but proficiency in whist implies a capacity for success in all these more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind.

I’ve written here before about the dangers that chess poses for the young mind: like the abstractions of philosophy, the abstractions of chess, with its clearly defined space and variety of action, risk appearing more appealing and alluring than life itself. Next to chess (even for the patzer), and next to philosophy (even for the young sophist), experience seems to be of little value. The redemption of these abstractions is genius—the irresistible force that blows practical objections aside. In the absence of genius, these games of logic are vices.

Fischer’s idiosyncrasy—his literally singular mixture of traits—also entails his greatness. The world’s best chess player is, at the very least, unique in his or her superiority, and that fact alone redeems the champion’s possible unfitness for other activities. The real subject of “Pawn Sacrifice” isn’t even Fischer or chess itself but nerdiness, a specialty that renders its expert less fit or apt to take part in a wide range of social activities and more apt to bring them into connection with only a band of like-minded devotees.

That’s as much of a problem for, say, religious scholars with a sinecure as it is for movie buffs focussing on technical or historical matters, for scholars of literature who look closely at the technical aspects of language rather than the substance of stories, or ideologues of all stripes. More or less any pursuit can be reduced to nerd-inspiring abstractions. Some, such as math and music, have little else, but they’re de-nerded by the essential world-changing power of math in science and engineering, and by the theatrical drama and public performance of music. (The great story of the musical nerd-genius—who, of course, withdrew from the public stage—is that of Glenn Gould.)

It often seems that it’s good for a child to learn to do anything with discipline and passion. But passions are often misguided (whether due to a warped inner compass or a strong outside influence) and discipline is, by definition, unprincipled. Children need to learn not just how to learn but how to live; that’s the high and grand reason built, only seemingly by accident, into the evolution of the social labyrinth of high school.

Genius is a form of tunnel vision and leaves little room for contact with common sense. The genius plumbs the depths of the soul and scales the heights of imagination—much of which is best left merely imagined and unrealized. The world suffers next to the purity of the genius's vision; but purity is not of the world, or of mankind. Artistic talent or creative genius shouldn’t be mistaken for wisdom. Not even the world’s greatest whist player is likely to know anything more clearly than how to succeed.

The bio-pic that’s centered on a great person has an added thrill built in—the marvel of greatness itself, the dazzling and bewildering disproportion between being the best in the world at something (whether it’s chess or jazz or computer design) and nonetheless being an ordinary mortal beset with the same ordinary cares as people of merely ordinary talent (the classic sports trope about the opponent who puts his pants on one leg at a time, same as anyone). Although “Pawn Sacrifice” doesn’t have much to say about Fischer’s genius, it’s nearly enough that it depicts the genius in action, passing from stage to stage of his achievements, to generate the idea, if not the feeling, of a world-historical force of nature that gets enmeshed in mighty struggles of love and money, politics and faith and renders them, alongside the monumental scope of his genius, trivial.

At the very least, Zwick and his screenwriters don’t yield to the temptation of the decadent form of the bio-pic: the shocked or reproachful revelation that a hero or heroine of art or science has feet of clay, whether earned through bilious ideas or wanton behavior. (The latest incarnation is the documentary “Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine.”) Why would anyone expect extraordinary creators, inventors, or visionaries to live by ordinary ethics? Why expect the bearers of the most unusual and daring ideas in their field to hold ordinary ideas in other fields? Or why, for that matter, expect people who have lived with a single-minded dedication to a single narrow field of endeavor to know anything special, let alone anything practical, about life at large? Looking for moral guidance from the extraordinary thinker or creator or inventor is like going to Casablanca for the waters.

I’m not advocating a free pass or get-out-of-jail card for geniuses, whether certified or self-proclaimed, but suggesting rather that the inability of certain rare, strong, and unworldly characters to live humanely and within self-imposed limits is a tragedy in the classical, Aristotelian sense.

Though “Pawn Sacrifice” offers little that’s new on the subject of genius, and shrinks much of the mysterious wonder of Fischer’s character, it also stands back and merely marvels at his singular trajectory, withholding judgment along with comprehension. It’s this very awestruck modesty that redeems the movie’s banality and, inviting wide-ranging speculation and invoking free-flowing wonder, sparks a surprising delight.